Writing Erlang with vim
Did you know that there's a suite of vim plugins dedicated to Erlang development making it, hands down, the best Erlang/OTP development environment? Let me break it down for you.
Disclaimer All vim plugins mentioned in this article come with documentation. Look it up in anything's unclear. Also feel free to ping me :)
Documentation lookups
thinca who's one of my favorite plugin authors,
wrote the inconspicuous (due to the lack of README)
vim-ref plugin.
It integrates well with the excellent unite.vim, my all time favorite, and provides the user with remarkable experience of browsing docs for many open source projects such as Clojure, Perl, PyDoc, manpages, and of course Erlang/OTP. Writing about unite is out of scope of this blog post, but I encourage you to look for useful information here, here and there.
Here's a short demo of vim-ref for Erlang in action:
vim-ref is smart enough to bind my K (the default key for manpages lookup).
Additional settings I use:
let g:ref_use_vimproc = 1
let g:ref_open = 'split'
let g:ref_cache_dir = expand($TMP . '/vim_ref_cache/')
nno <leader>K :<C-u>Unite ref/erlang
\ -vertical -default-action=split<CR>Get the errors as you save
Csaba is my IRL friend and the main guy behind vim-erlang project. He wrote the absolutely amazing vim-erlang-runtime and vim-erlang-compiler plugins. The former provides you with up to date, slick set of syntax highlithing rules, while the latter delivers compilation errors (and warnings) straight to your list window. Both plugins require zero configuration, just plug and play. Here's a sneak peek:
Jump between modules and symbols definitions
vim-erlang-tags is another
must-have in our toolbelt. As you probably know, vim out of the box has
an excellent support for ctags. The problem with that is ctags doesn't care
about Erlang modules. So for instance, it can't really distinguish between
foo:moo() and bar:moo().
Csaba figured out a wondeful hack to overcome this, and I took the opportunity to optimize its indexing speed (it still does take a few seconds to generate the whole tag tree for Erlang/OTP distribution - pull requests are welcome!). Enjoy this little demo operating on R16B02 codebase:
As with the previous plugins, this one requires no extra configuration and will
work out of the box with your standard ctags bindings.
tmux integration
One thing that was always making me Emacs-envy was its fine tuned integration with all kinds of REPLs. Although, vim is way worse when it comes to understanding LISPs (and understandning more than text in general, due to its nature), vim users should be more than happy with using the vim-tmux combo, that plays really well together.
There are many vim tmux plugins. The one I chose after evaluating a few of them is tslime by Steve Losh, since it requires no extra configuration and provides a set of defaults that just work for me.
tmux is my daily-driver. I used to use iTerm2 but then ditched it for
standard OSX Terminal (for lolspeed) and tmux and I've been happy ever since,
especially with the marvelous tmux-plugins suite.
The way tslime works is it can send any input to a particular triple
of session/pane/window.
I use the default C-c C-c keybinding which works with visual selections as
well. It's emacsy - yes. I use PFU
HHKB keyboard and it taught me that
Ctrl key's place is where the world thinks Caps Lock should be. Remapping your
Caps Lock to Ctrl is a game changer and I encourage you to try it. With OSX it's super easy:
Here's a quick demo of tmux/vim interaction with the Erlang shell:
Templates / snippets
For quick snippets I decided to go with neosnippet by The Dark Master of vim himself.
The only configuration tweaks I use are as follows:
let g:neosnippet#snippets_directory = expand($VIM . 'snippets')
let g:neosnippet#disable_runtime_snippets = {
\ 'erlang' : 1
\ }
imap <C-k> <Plug>(neosnippet_expand_or_jump)
smap <C-k> <Plug>(neosnippet_expand_or_jump)
xmap <C-k> <Plug>(neosnippet_expand_target)I made a gist with my Erlang snippets if you're interested. And this is how it works in practice:
Other goodies worth mentioning
There are more helpful plugins when it comes to Erlang/OTP development. Make sure you check out the following:
- vim-erlang-omnicomplete is the Ctrl+Space of Java/.NET world visiting vim and erlang!
- erlang-motions helps you navigate between function clauses and declarations quickly (within a single module)
Happy hacking!